With 2.98 billion monthly active users, Facebook is the third-busiest website on the internet and has built an extensive infrastructure to support its massive user base. Since it launched its first company-built and -operated server farm in Prineville, Oregon, in April 2011, the social media platform has not stopped building new data centers and seeking new data center sites. Facebook's data centers house tens of thousands of computer servers -- networked together and linked to the outside world through fiber optic cables.
We've often written about the scale of Facebook's data center operations. Here's a glimpse of what a Facebook data center campus looks like from the air - in this case, the facility in Rutherford County, North Carolina.
Facebook will build a huge new data center in northern Sweden to support the rapid global growth of its users, the company said today. The new data center in Lulea, Sweden will be Facebook's first facility outside the United States.
Facebook will build a second huge data center on its campus in Prineville, Oregon, the company confirmed Tuesday. Facebook will begin construction in October on a facility similar to its existing 300,000 square foot data center.
Facebook says that it will gradually shift its server capacity from leased data centers to company-owned facilities, migrating out of third-party facilities as its leases expire. That means Facebook will be vacating a significant chunk of...
Skype is investing in additional servers and bandwidth to prepare for an impending influx of new users from Facebook, which last week announced that it will offer users Skype-powered video calling through the Facebook.com site.
Facebook plans to run its future data centers at warmer temperatures, raising the server inlet temperature as high as 85 degrees. The company said the decision was based on testing at its new Prineville, Oregon facility.
Facebook is moving ahead quickly on construction of its next huge data center. The $450 million project in Rutherford County, North Carolina will be the second company-built data center for Facebook.
Officials in Prineville, Oregon say they are in discussion with two additional companies about building data centers in the town, where Facebook just opened its first company-built data center.
As Facebook expanded its data center network to Oregon, the data center team ran some large-scale simulations, and used a new software tool to automate the deployment of new server capacity.